Friday, 27 February 2015

Quartet on X1000

Today I wanted to take a quick look at the recently released game Quartet for AmigaOS4.1 on the AmigaOne X1000.

Quartet is a game written by Photon Storm originally and ported to AmigaOS4.1 by Nick "root" Sommer. It is the first third party game released through AmiBoing (EntwicklerX) using their online highscore table structures.

The game is free to download. (the original version is still available for a small cost for iOS on Apple's App Store)

Once downloaded an extracted you will see the following Quartet folder:

The nfo.txt file doesn't contain any information about the game other than some credits, so let's dive in!

When you run Quartet it immediately prompts you for your AmiBoing credentials to register your highscores on the AmiBoing server, and to download the latest high scores from other people playing the game from around the world. You can register a profile at amiboing.de

Note that the AmiBoing login here requires you to press Enter after each field is entered in:

You can click the option at the bottom to login in offline mode if you prefer it, or don't have an Amiboing profile yet.

Soon after the Quartet title screen appears:

From the main menu you can turn off the Music and sound effects and view the Credits:

The Highscore table is also on the Main Menu as an option:

Helpfully there is a How to Play option that shows you how to get started with the game:

Basically you are trying to form complete faces in each of the 4 squares by positioning pieces presented to you in the middle square into one of the available boxes.

Each piece fits in top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right positions within each square. If you put two pieces that are top left in the same square, you lose a life.

If you get all 4 face pieces within a square, you get a score for forming a "Face". If you can match 4 pieces of the same type then you get a much larger score for getting a "Full Face"

You have 6 lives to start with, but trust me when I say that they don't last long!

When the game begins slowly and gets faster and faster as you get more Faces completed - quick response time is the key to this game:

Given the fast nature of this game it is nice that the programmer included a Pause option!

Game Over comes quickly, and often in this game as you learn the ropes. It is quite addictive though, and I had to keep trying!